Useless and Annoying Software

Mythbuntu installations are coming with more and more useless packages pre-installed. Why should M$ platforms be the only platforms that come with craplets, crapware and bloatware? Linux (and especially Ubuntu) should get in on the game. Looks like we're taking this idea to heart.

One particularly useless as well as annoying piece of crapware is the Ubuntu Software Center. Not only is this an especially lame attempt at a package manager but it also tries to sell you magazine subscriptions as you go. Who needs this junk? The Synaptics Package Manager (see the "Useful Software" section) works quite well, thank-you very much. To get rid of the Ubuntu Software Center, you can enter this command on the command line:

     sudo apt-get purge software-center

Another really annoying "feature" is Zeroconf and the daemon that implements it, AVAHI. This feature is a misguided attempt to make all of your computers work like Macs, with their plug 'n pray Bonjour protocol. Just plug your computer into a network port and it will figure everything out. An idiot could do it. Sadly, if you're an idiot, you won't be using Mythbuntu since it is difficult to operate itself and way above the idiot level, so software for idiots like Zeroconf just gets in the way.

Unfortunately, for our purposes and especially when we're running a master backend, we need to know the IP address of each machine. We can't have some well-meaning but misguided piece of crapware making up IP addresses for us. But, that's just what AVAHI does. If your DHCP server is a wee bit slow to respond, AVAHI will make up an incorrect IP address for you and then nothing will work. Or, if you forget to assign a static IP address, same thing. Hours of debugging fun will then follow, since your network will appear to be working but nothing will be where you think it is. And how about this? If your network connection goes down, even for a few seconds, AVAHI steps in, makes up an IP address and then all of your other network addresses stop working when the network comes back. Who dreams this stuff up?

To get rid of Zeroconf, it is simply necessary to get rid of AVAHI:

     apt-get purge avahi-autoipd avahi-daemon

Once you're done, you can yo-yo the network down/up. On earlier versions of Mythbuntu, this was easy, simply requiring a few commands to be typed on the console. With the later versions of Mythbuntu, that use upstart, this theoretically can be accomplished with:

     sudo stop networking
     sudo start networking

Although, under Mythbuntu 12.04LTS, this method doesn't work and seems to leave networking sort of in limbo (nice work, guys -- that upstart thingy is a real winner). Of course, the ultimate test is to reboot the system, which works even when upstart doesn't. Either way, listing the routes on the system should show that everything is working OK:

     /sbin/route

You should see something like this (with no mention of link-local or any 169.254.x.x addresses):

     Kernel IP routing table
     Destination     Gateway        Genmask         Flags Metric Ref   Use Iface
     default         192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0         UG    100    0       0 eth0
     192.168.1.0     *              255.255.255.0   U     0      0       0 eth0

CUPS or the Common Unix Printing System is a fine system that does an excellent job of spooling printed output to all sorts of printers. Its just not something that most people need to have installed on their media computers. If you don't think you'll be wanting to print anything from your Mythbuntu system, you may wish to uninstall CUPS like this:

     sudo apt-get purge cups

These packages auto-install a number of packages which may not be needed after the useless packages have been purged. You can remove them, once you've removed all of the useless packages, by running:

     sudo apt-get autoremove